The Promise and Failure of the Zionist-Maronite Relationship, 1920-1948
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The Promise and Failure of the Zionist-Maronite Relationship, 1920-1948 Master’s Thesis Presented to The Faculty of Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Brandeis University Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies Ilan Troen, Graduate Advisor In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Master’s Degree by Scott Abramson February 2012 Acknowledgements I cannot omit the expression of my deepest gratitude to my defense committee, the formidable triumvirate of Professors Troen, Makiya, and Salameh. To register my admiration for these scholars would be to court extravagance (and deplete a printer cartridge), so I shall have to limit myself to this brief tribute of heartfelt thanks. ii ABSTRACT The Promise and Failure of the Zionist-Maronite Relationship, 1920-1948 A thesis presented to the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Brandeis University Waltham, Massachusetts By Scott Abramson Much of the historiography on the intercourse between Palestinian Jews and Lebanese Maronites concerns only the two peoples’ relations in the seventies and eighties. This thesis, in contrast, attempts a departure from this scholarship, joining the handful of other works that chart the history of the Zionist-Maronite relationship in its earliest incarnation. From its inception to its abeyance beginning in 1948, this almost thirty-year relationship was marked by a search of a formal alliance. This thesis, by presenting a panoptical survey of early Zionist-Maronite relations, explores the many dimensions of this pursuit. It details the Zionists and Maronites’ numerous commonalities that made an alliance desirable and apparently possible; it profiles the specific elements among the Zionists and Maronites who sought an entente; it examines each of the measures the two peoples took to this end; and it analyzes why this protracted pursuit ultimately failed. The study concludes that the liabilities of a formal association with the Zionists in the Middle East and ―Arabist‖ developments in Lebanon beginning in the early forties conspired to prevent the Zionists and Maronites’ friendship from graduating to a formal alliance. iii Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter One: Affinities 4 Chapter Two: The Beginning of a Relationship 23 Chapter Three: Elusive Objectives 49 Chapter Four: An Appraisal of Failure 83 Bibliography 98 iv The Promise and Failure of the Zionist-Maronite Alliance, 1920-1948 Introduction ―Reach a [peace] agreement with one of the other Arab states first,‖ said the Maronite negotiators to their Israeli counterparts during the Lebanese-Israeli armistice talks in 1949; ―Lebanon will be the second.‖1 The implication, conveyed as if by winking, was in any case obvious: Only after a more powerful Arab country had shattered the taboo of making peace with Israel would small and vulnerable Lebanon, ever at the mercy of the Arab world, be free to realize its natural friendship with Israel and follow suit. Flash forward to the summer of 2006: In the wake of the 34-day war between Israel and Hezbollah, Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora vowed that ―Lebanon will be the last Arab country to sign a peace treaty with Israel.‖2 What changed? How, in the course of a half-century, did peace between Israel and Lebanon go from being so easy of attainment to so remote a prospect? To answer this question is to inquire into both the modern history of Lebanese Maronites and of Zionist/Israeli- Maronite relations. The self-styled non-Arab3 Maronite negotiators in 1949 had given utterance to a sentiment that the Israelis had already well understood: As far as the Zionist-Arab conflict was concerned, Lebanon was different from the other states in the Middle East. 1 Tom Segev, 1949: The First Israelis (New York: Free Press, 1986), 9. 2 John Kifner, “Lebanese Politicians, Scarce in War, Renew Bickering,” New York Times, September 3, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/03/world/middleeast/03lebanon.html. 3 Benny Morris, 1948: The First Arab-Israeli War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 378. 1 And what distinguished it was that the largest and most powerful element of the country’s famously motley population was the Maronites. Decades before Lebanon’s token participation in the first Arab-Israeli war—about which it was claimed that nary a Maronite soldier had crossed into Israel—4 the Zionists had observed not only the Maronites’ deviation from the regional order but also the many commonalities of circumstance and identity they shared with them. The Maronites, for their part, had taken a similar view of Palestinian Jewry. And indeed it was they, not the Zionists, who first conceived the idea that the corollary of these many bonds was an alliance between the two neighbors.5 Barely had the idea gestated than Zionists and sympathetic Maronites set themselves to fulfilling it. But as with the half-century of Israeli-Lebanese relations bracketed by the Maronite negotiators’ pledge and Siniora’s vow, Zionist-Maronite intercourse between 1920 and 1948 lacked in results what it offered in potential. Nevertheless, the two communities would not be dissuaded from their ambition until the 1980s, when the near- realization of the alliance proved to be such a fiasco that it finally put the quietus to the idea. But what ended with Israel’s war in Lebanon in the eighties had begun not long after the First World War. And indeed many of the obstacles that prevented an Israeli- Maronite alliance in the eighties were foreshadowed in the thirties and forties. It is this lesser-known era of Zionist-Maronite attempts to forge an alliance that is the focus of this work. 4 Matthew Hughes, “Lebanon’s Armed Forces and the Arab-Israeli War, 1948-1949,” Journal of Palestine Studies 34, no. 2 (Winter 2005), 28. 5 Laura Zittrain Eisenberg, My Enemy’s Enemy: Lebanon in the Early Zionist Imagination, 1900-1948 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), 30. 2 The juxtaposition of the two quotations above captures the two great themes of the Zionist-Maronite relationship: promise and failure. Throughout this study, which charts the history of Zionist-Maronite relations from the two communities’ first flirtations to the establishment of the state of Israel, these two themes dominate. The first chapter begins with the theme of promise, as it surveys the histories of Zionists and Maronites in the Levant with particular accent on the two communities’ distinctiveness and incongruity in the region. From there, it collates the Zionists’ and Maronites’ similarities to each other and their mutual differences with the Middle East’s Arab Muslim majority. Chapter two looks at the Zionists and Maronites’ earliest contacts and outlines each side’s interests in an entente. Further, it presents a prosopography of the three Maronite circles that aspired to an alliance with the Zionists, revealing that pro-Zionist Maronites were athwart the tide of Lebanese history. Promise begins to give way to failure in the third chapter, which traces the arc of the Zionists and Maronites’ attempts an alliance from 1933, when the pursuit for a partnership began in earnest, to 1948, when Israel was created and the quest for an alliance suspended. Special attention is given in this chapter to post-Vichy Lebanon’s drift toward the Arab states and the concomitant decline of the Maronite pro-Zionists. Gloomy is the tenor of the fourth and final chapter, appropriately titled ―An Appraisal of Failure.‖ This section analyzes the manifold reasons that a Zionist-Maronite alliance never became more than an achingly tantalizing prospect for its seekers. 3 Chapter One: Affinities ―And there was peace between Hiram and Solomon; and they two made a league together.‖6 So reads a rather indistinctive Biblical verse relating the amity and cooperation between the Phoenician king of the Lebanese city-state of Tyre and his Israelite counterpart. One might well grasp to find relevance for this verse in the geopolitics of the modern Middle East. But for many of the Maronite and Jewish proponents of an alliance between Lebanon and the Zionists, this passage and its like served as no less than a historical template for reviving the ancient entente between the two Levantine states. At times during the last century, the quixotic champions of this alliance who repaired to the Bible for inspiration might have seemed justified in their romanticism. Indeed, so numerous were the resemblances between Maronites and Zionists that the disparities between antiquity and modernity, romanticism and reality, appeared comparatively trifling. And so, before the disillusionments of Middle Eastern statecraft dispelled their idealism, many Maronites and Zionists believed that it was these many resemblances that made an alliance not only desirable, but natural and inevitable. Alterity and Affinity Any survey of the dramatis personae of the Levant in the early twentieth century would quite quickly reveal two protagonists, Lebanese Maronites and Palestinian Jews, 6 1 Kings 5:12 (KJV) 4 as the region’s most conspicuous anomalies. Even within the Levant’s Balkanized social landscape, the two communities stood apart as outliers in confession, cultural sensibility, national sentiment, and political aspiration. But this isolation carried a curious inversion: Lebanese Maronites and Palestinian Jews were, in respect to identity, as near to each other as they were distant from the Levant’s majority. It was this duality of alterity to their neighbors and affinity to each other that seemed to almost foreordain a Maronite- Zionist rendezvous. As Zionist representative Chaim Arlosoroff put it in 1933, the two nations partook of a ―natural community of fate.‖7 To appreciate how these social alignments came about, it is well to probe the Maronites’ and Zionists’ respective histories in the region and, finally, their similarities of circumstance and identity. The Maronites’ History as a Distinctive Levantine Community In the seventh century, amid yet another Christological controversy roiling within Christendom, the first stirrings of the Maronite church were felt.